Sadly, I've never had a dog (hope to get one soon). But from knowing friends' dogs, it's obvious that they get sad, and depressed and excited, just like we do (only, we don't wag our tails!).

"Emotion researchers" have been arguing for years whether jealousy
requires complex cognition, newswise.com reports. And some scientists have even said that
jealousy is an entirely social construct – not seen in all human
cultures and not fundamental or hard-wired in the same ways that fear
and anger are.

But the new findings support the view that there may be a more basic form of
jealousy, which evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers, according to the Web site.

They show that dogs exhibit more jealous behaviors, like snapping and
pushing at their owner or the rival, when the owner showed affection to
what appeared to be another dog (actually a stuffed dog that barked,
whined and wagged its tail). Dogs exhibited these behaviors more than
if the same affection was showered on a novel object and much more than
when the owner’s attention was simply diverted by reading a book.

“Our
study suggests not only that dogs do engage in what appear to be
jealous behaviors but also that they were seeking to break up the
connection between the owner and a seeming rival,” said UC San Diego psychology professor Christine Harris. “We
can’t really speak to the dogs’ subjective experiences, of course, but
it looks as though they were motivated to protect an important social
relationship.”

Dogs were about twice as likely to push or touch the owner when the
owner was interacting with the faux dog (78 percent) as when the owner
was attending to an object (42 percent). About 30 percent of the dogs also tried to get
between their owner and the stuffed animal. And while 25 percent snapped
at the “other dog,” only one did so at the two other objects paid attention to by owners -- a pail and a book -- also used in the study.

“Many people have assumed that jealousy is a social construction of
human beings – or that it's an emotion specifically tied to sexual and
romantic relationships,” Harris said. “Our results challenge these
ideas, showing that animals besides ourselves display strong distress
whenever a rival usurps a loved one's affection.”

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